Hanif Kureishi’s novel The Last Word explores the powers of language (Picture: iandodds.co.uk)

Review: Hanif Kureishi – The Last Word (Faber)

How do you tell the story of a life? Is it ever possible to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Or will an element of subjectivity from the storyteller – or listener – creep in?

Such questions are at the heart of the provocative, powerful new novel from Hanif Kureishi, author of such noted works as The Buddha Of Suburbia, Intimacy and the Oscar-nominated screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette.

The Last Word revolves around a young biographer, Harry, assigned to write the life of the ageing writer Mamoon, and through these intriguing protagonists (whose relationship seems to echo that of VS Naipaul and biographer Patrick French), Kureishi rigorously explores the thorny nature of storytelling, patrolling the blurred line between memory and fact.

It was ‘both an advantage and a nuisance writing about someone who was alive’, warns Harry’s editor Rob, and the virtues and vices of having a living, breathing subject matter are hilariously evoked.

To whom does ‘the last word’ belong – to the writer or biographer, or indeed, to the reading public?

The characters in the verbal boxing-ring, wrestling over words, are 70-something Indian-born writer Mamoon, who has forged his career in England writing novels, essays, plays and adaptations of classics but realises his reputation and bank balance are declining; his querulous wife, ‘a woman of longing’, pulling at his purse strings; Harry, and editor Rob, who advises him the book will be his ‘ticket to ride’ and to write ‘as mad and wild’ a book as possible: ‘Extreme biography, that is your job.’

Not only does this novel explore the last word as it pertains to judging a book but also judging the people within our own lives.

Who has the last word in a marriage, in a friendship, in a working partnership? Words are highly charged as people play tug-of-war with language.

Confrontation is a key theme in a narrative bristling with arguments, as Harry exposes the ‘accumulation of hurts’ within a household.

Yet it isn’t actually the last word that is the most engaging theme but first words: the earliest beginnings of a writer, the origins of language and the desire to communicate.

Harry explores not only Mamoon’s life but his own childhood: ‘He knew then there was another mother within the mother he believed he knew.’

Kureishi skilfully peels away the layers of his characters as if he were unveiling Russian dolls.

Mamoon complains about ‘the fatal burden of being a writer with nothing left to say’ – thankfully, Kureishi hasn’t yet reached this stage himself.

What he does have to say is about the writing process itself, probing the boundary between art and life (‘He was, after all, just a man, and not merely a narrative’).

The Last Word grippingly explores the point at which a real human being becomes a character: ‘He was becoming something else, an invented or made-up man, someone who had lived only so Harry could write a book about him.’

‘The best stories are the open ones, the ones you don’t quite understand,’ says Mamoon and, likewise, this is an open-ended tale, challenging our understanding by cleverly creating a kaleidoscope of impressions around a character.

A novel about how ‘it’s frustration that makes creativity possible’ is at times itself a frustrating, but ultimately rewarding, read about the terror and wonder of writing.